


Hope is a child who will live and thrive

by imsfire



Series: Rogue One Anniversary prompts [7]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Cassian not sure how to do the same but he's working on it, Gen, Hope, Jyn finding a calling, Post-War, Shara Bey mentioned briefly, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Thinking About the Future, baby Poe mentioned briefly, new parents Jyn and Cassian, peace after a lifetime of conflict, prompt day 6: Hope, these poor damaged ex-child-soldiers, trying to work out what you do with your life, written for the Rogue One First Anniversary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-15 05:18:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13024044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: He has the freedom now to rest and try to find who he is, who he can be.  He barely knows how to.  He’s a spy, a soldier, a sharp-shooter, but all of that has to be left behind now; he’s Jyn Erso’s husband and Esperanz Andor-Erso’s father, but who is he in himself?





	Hope is a child who will live and thrive

By the time Esperanz Andor-Erso celebrates his first birthday, there are several dozen babies in the little colony on Yavin 4.  The huddle of tents and flat-pack homes beside the bay, a few miles from the old base at Massassi, has grown into a rough-and-ready kind of port town, and the settlers are beginning, with a kind of reverent determination, to refer to themselves not as army veterans and Alderaanian refugees, but New Yavinians. 

It no longer feels like living in a transit camp, or a place nobody wants to be.  The growing toddlers of this mini-baby-boom are starting to explore their world and discover the delights of dirt and flowers and puddles, of bouncing balls and bobbing balloons, and the wide variety of native invertebrate life.  The oldest child in the colony, an excitable four year-old called Poe, runs around after them like a little papa hen, protecting and commanding and getting muddier by the minute.  Watching them all is a restorative better than any number of sermons on hope. 

A lot of the children are called Hope, too, in one language or another.  Esperanz, Sperança, Otti, Elpida, Siaba, Ümit, Palaume, Hoffni and Hofnun, Hope and Hopeful, Hober and Remeny and Gobaitha…  There are two Lukes, as well, and two Brehas, and no less than four Leias; two Landos, a Han and a Hanno; and to Jyn’s uneasy embarrassment, a Jyn and a Jinny. 

There are no baby Cassians; Cassian has quietly vetoed it, both times he was approached, and suggested names more worthy of commemoration.  Serchill Tarana, with a smile as wide as a sunny horizon, and little Taidu Benites who hasn’t stopped crawling since he learned how, both owe their names to his intervention. 

He writes the records with real pleasure the day someone comes to register a new-born baby boy as Bodhi.  Bodhi Tellesario; it sounds good, he tells the pilot over a long comm chat.

Bodhi’s eyes widen expressively.  “Oh good grief.”

“He’s a lovely healthy child, he’ll live long and thrive.”

“It’s an – it’s an honour but – oh, good grief.  I never expected.  They must be getting desperate, is all.  For new names, I mean.  Honestly, Cassian, is there a single person in the whole of Puerto Nuevo that hasn’t had a baby?”

“Well, none of the singletons, at least not yet.  And the Drabatans aren’t yet aligned in their cycles, apparently.  Jyn had a long talk at the fish market a few weeks ago and learned all about their reproductive biology.  She’s been telling me things I’m still not entirely sure I wanted to know.”

Bodhi blinks. “Wow.  Please don’t feel you need to share.  Why in the stars is Jyn asking about how Draba’ make babies?”

“She’s started training as a Midwife and Community Health Officer.”

“Whoah, wow.  Stars.  _Jyn?_   Don’t tell her I said that – I mean, don’t tell her I said it _like_ that! That’s terrific news, she’ll, she’ll be great at it, I’m just – it’s quite a – a _people_ job, isn’t it?  For Jyn, I mean?  What gave her the idea?”

“She wants to be a doctor, eventually.  But at the moment we mainly need another midwife and nurse, so that’s the logical place to start, and – Bodhi, you should visit.  It’s hard to describe.  Jyn has – she’s found something that matters to her.   I always knew there was so much more inside her than – the stuff we did in the war – and now she’s – she’s _opening_.  I never thought I’d see her open up so much.  She’s so bright inside, it’s like watching one of those rocks, when you break it open and there are crystals inside –“

“A geode?”

“Is that what they’re called?  Yeah.  She – she’s started to chat to people more, it’s like she’s finally at peace with words and it makes her happy to use them now.  And she laughs sometimes.  I will never get tired of hearing her laugh.  And she wants to do something with her time, something that’s practical and does good for other people.  We’ve both been trying to work out what to do, you know?  Your skills are useful in peacetime; ours, not so much. So…”

With only Shara Bey preceding her, Jyn has had to learn pretty much everything about pregnancy and motherhood from scratch.  So many of the settlers were serving soldiers, and so many of them lost their entire family in the genocide of the Alderaanian Disaster; their little town has an age bracket weighted heavily to the under-forties, and almost no elders at all, no abuelas to give advice and reassurance.  All these young families have is each other.  It makes sense for someone who’s learned from experience to pass that knowledge on, and Jyn has been doing so, assiduously; at first out of a sense of duty and then with the growing happiness of someone who just may have found a real calling.  Her characteristic bluntness is weathering down, slowly and gently, into a simple directness of speech that new parents in particular seem to appreciate.

“I’m proud of her,” he tells Bodhi.  “I wish I had as much idea of what to do with my life.”

“You’ll get there.  I’m sure of it.”

There’s a crash from the area of the back door, and Esper comes in, toddling at a wobbly top speed of three knots.  He’s bedraggled and chortling, with leaves in his hair and his romper covered in grass stains.  “Ah.  Bodhi, I’m gonna have to go, got a happy young man to get cleaned up here.”

Rather to his surprise, after years of “pay” being nominal at best and often six months in arrears, Cassian has suddenly found himself in receipt of a pension.  He’d never expected something like this.  But then, even if he had known, he would never have anticipated living long enough to get it.  25 years of service to the Alliance, and almost as many injuries over the course of those years; it’s surprisingly gratifying to find that someone thinks this should equate to allowing him enough credits to live on, now. 

It gives him a freedom to rest and try to find who he is, who he can be.  He barely knows how.  He’s a spy, a soldier, a sharp-shooter, but all of that has to be left behind now; he’s Jyn Erso’s husband and Esperanz Andor-Erso’s father, but who is he in himself?

Sometimes he talks to the other colonists, sitting with Esper on his knee while Jyn shows them how to fill in a growth chart and keep immunisation records.  A heartbreakingly large number of them say the same thing; the future is something they’d no longer believed existed for them.  With home and family and history all lost, the people of Yavin Colony were the fighters with nothing to lose, and they have all known what it is to take the next chance, without a care for their own life. 

The seed of hope, sprouting and growing as their children grow; it’s vital to them all as breathing.

They talk; and some of them talk a lot.  They talk because they need to. 

He wishes he had it in him to train as a counsellor and therapist.  It would go well with Jyn’s plans; they’d be a two-person team, helping bodies and minds.  But he knows the darkness in his own life runs too deep.  It surely cannot be possible for him to illuminate others now, not out of that utter midnight.

It’s a shame, though; he knows he’s a more than competent listener.  As the new trainee Health Officer’s husband Cassian has become a de facto records-keeper, noting the colony’s births, partnerships, bereavements.  It’s an act of hope and of defiance against the world that tried to crush them all, to observe such formalities carefully now, to ensure every marriage, every death, every new life is recorded for posterity.  It says _We are still here, we survived._  

And coming to tell him these things, people tell him stories.

It’s true that some of what they tell him makes him almost ill with grief.  But that seems a fair price, for all the grief he’s caused.  The thought strengthens him; perhaps he can atone for a fraction of his life this way.  He sits and listens, as he did for so many years when contacts had to be sounded-out, or despairing citizens poured out their stories and he assessed if they might be safe to recruit. 

He wants to hide underground, from the blaze of their pain; and he wants to give them the chance to let that fire out, before it consumes them from the inside.  He listens.

People want to talk about more than just the destruction and the loved ones they’ve lost.  They tell him about the books they read as a child, about their cousins’ farm in the mountains and the garden at their old school, and that year the whole family went to the wine country on holiday.  And wildflowers, and spiders, and the colours of sunset; the fruit that a grandfather bottled each autumn, the noise of a big market on festival days. _Oh, I remember the dawn chorus, it was so musical, all the birds and insects harmonising, not like here where everything shrieks; I remember the water tasted different, I remember learning to play the double-pipe, every kid at my school had to learn, what a racket it made!..._

“You should write some of it down,” Jyn says.  “Record people’s stories.  Kind of a history project.”

It sticks, that thought, where others have fallen off.  That’s interesting in itself; his is a mind he schooled for years to hang on to nothing but the essential, and to let nothing get a hold on it.  It’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to work out who Cassian Andor can be, now; he’s never allowed himself to be interested in anything personal for himself.  Even reaching out for Jyn had come from instinct rather than rational interest; it was a gut-level need he didn’t dare to name for several years.

But the idea of telling a history, that is interesting…

History, yes, but a history of all the things that would be forgotten when a text book explains the war.  An oral history; of Alderaan, and maybe later of NiJedha, of Lothal, of Kashyyyk and Geonosis; of all the places that exist now only in memory and all those ruined beyond repair; the story of the people whose lives were shaped by them.

A historian; it would be a quiet job, one for someone who needs to stand in the background without attention being drawn to them.  A chance to give back, after spending so many years taking.  To plant more of those seeds, so that none of these children has to grow up in the dark, without knowing where they come from or what they can be proud of, what gave them life.

He lifts Esperanz onto his knee, picks the burrs and leaves from his clothing.  Cuddles his son and tickles him, shivers with the thrill of that giggle, that big perfect smile.

Is it him, could it be his future, helping to save their past?  He doesn’t know.  It’s a start, anyway.  Like Jyn, like Bodhi, like all the settlers and all little children in Puerto Nuevo and all over the New Republic, he can only make a start, in hope, and see where it leads him.

He has, they all have, the time.  And that is more than he’d ever hoped to be given.


End file.
